‘I WISH WE ALL CAME BACK’

Corpsman gets Silver Star, remembers slain comrade

When the bomb blasted his truck into the air and insurgents started shooting, “Doc Flores” went to work. The Navy hospital corpsman was deafened by the explosion. He couldn’t hear the bullets whizzing by, but he saw his Marines lying in the street.

Petty Officer 1st Class Benny Flores ran back and forth four times through gunfire to administer aid and help the wounded take cover from the ambush, military officials said. Blood from his own shrapnel wounds flowed down his arm, mingling with the blood of his comrades smeared across his tattered uniform sleeves.

For his actions April 28, 2012, in southwestern Afghanistan, Flores was awarded the Silver Star Friday at Camp Pendleton. He was selected for the nation’s third-highest medal for valor in combat because of the lifesaving medical care he provided several U.S. and Afghan troops despite heavy gunfire and his own serious injuries, the Marine Corps said.

Flores, a soft-spoken, humble sailor who grew up in Guam and Tinian, didn’t wake up that morning thinking “today’s the day I’m going to be a hero,” Maj. Gen. Charles Mark Gurganus said at the ceremony on the 1st Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Company parade deck.

Yet “even with his own wounds, he saw what needed to be done and he acted,” demonstrating extraordinary bravery and selflessness, Gurganus said.

Flores, now 30, was the field service medical technician for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force that day in the Zaranj district of Nimruz province, a relatively peaceful area near Iran.

The Marines and Afghan police were returning to camp after a routine visit to a border checkpoint under construction when a suicide bomber struck their convoy of unarmored Afghan police pickups.

Flores was riding in the bed of the truck when a man pushing a handcart packed with explosives and ball bearings triggered the blast, according to Michael M. Phillips, a Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote an eyewitness account.

It was so powerful it launched the truck onto the median under a column of billowing smoke. Then insurgents began firing from multiple directions on the stunned troops.

“Doc Flores appeared beside them,” Phillips wrote in his article “Under Attack,” which won the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation award this year for overseas reporting on the Marine Corps.

“The explosion had left bright red skid marks where it had burned the back of his neck. The sleeve of his camouflage shirt had been shredded and hung loose on his left arm, which was perforated by metal fragments. He ignored his own wounds … .”

The homemade bomb exploded next to the passenger door of the cab where Marine Master Sgt. Scott Pruitt was seated. The 38-year-old military accountant from Camp Pendleton — who had volunteered for the combat tour, his first, on the eve of his retirement — was killed.

Flores had met Pruitt two days earlier. He was surprised to find the master sergeant standing post at camp, giving his Marines a rest. They chatted for a long time about their daughters, he recalled.

Shrapnel sliced deeply into Pruitt’s neck and legs. He was unresponsive when Flores reached him but he applied tourniquets to both legs anyway. He couldn’t feel a pulse. “I just prayed to God we could still save him,” Flores said.

Perhaps no one is confronted more intimately with the horrors of war than hospital corpsmen and medics. When explosives rip apart a human body or stop a beating heart, the person the corpsman tries to save is often the friend or comrade.

Afterward, they often overlook the many they saved, haunted by the ones they couldn’t.

His own concussion and lacerations were serious enough to require hospitalization. But Flores didn’t worry about that until he was airborne with the wounded in the medevac flight to Camp Bastion.

“Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Flores steadfastly refused treatment for his own wounds until all of his comrades were treated. By his extraordinary guidance, zealous initiative, and total dedication to duty, Hospital Corpsman 1st Class Flores reflected great credit upon himself and upheld the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and the United States Naval Service,” according to his citation signed by Gen. James Amos, the Marine Corps commandant, on behalf of the president.

Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jason Flores, a Kiowa helicopter pilot in the Army, couldn’t believe they were talking about his little brother when he heard about it. Doc Flores had always been generous, always willing to spot his brother some cash, always the last to leave after cleaning up from a party. But what he did that day in Afghanistan, “It touched my heart,” Jason Flores said.

When he was wounded, Flores was two months into his tour, his third combat deployment after previous ones to Iraq and Kuwait. His wife, Jerianne, his high school sweetheart and mother of their 4-year-old daughter, wanted to choke him through the telephone line when she found out he chose to remain in Afghanistan until the end, Flores said.

He stayed because of the bond between the Marines and their corpsman. “We’ve got to take care of each other,” he said.

Before he left Afghanistan, he started wearing a black metal memorial bracelet to Pruitt. It adorns his wrist even now.

“I wish we all came back,” Flores said. He thinks about Pruitt almost every day, always wondering “if there was anything I could have done more.”